‘When We Were Live’ tells the story of how Austinites made their own television

Long before TikTok and YouTube made it possible for all of us to share video on the internet, Austinites with something to say could find a home on public access television. Viewers could tune in to shows ranging from music and politics, to relationship advice and cooking in drag – with bananas. 

Production values varied, but Austin Community Television showcased a wide array of local characters and gave viewers a window into the city’s eccentricities, along with issues like AIDS and even a march down Congress Avenue by the KKK.

John Spottswood Moore directed the new film, “When We Were Live.” It features rare archival footage and interviews with some of the people who made the ACTV scene so eclectic.

Moore says public access in Austin began with a group of students in 1973. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: Well, tell us something about the history of public access TV in Austin. It began, I guess, in the 1970s?

John Moore: Actually, I believe the first broadcast would have been around April of 1973. I’m sure that there’s somebody out there who’s ready to correct me on that on the exact day.

But it’s really amazing. It was a group of UT students – actually, which is very ironic, sitting here doing this interview right across the street from where it all began.

And Anita Binda – who was actually subbing for somebody for a semester, who was off on like a Fulbright Scholarship, I believe – and she was teaching a normal RTF class and signal distribution. And some of the students kind of got wind of this very little-known law that had been passed just a few years earlier saying that if you had a major market cable company or cable subscription model in your town, then what Congress basically said was that in exchange for them tearing up your streets and laying down all this cable, they were required to give you airtime to air your own programming. But nobody really took advantage of it that much at the time.

So they kind of said, “well, wait a minute. Maybe we should.” So they got their stuff together. They kind of bargained with the cable company, that was owned by LBJ at the time, called Capital Cable. And they basically were told, “yes, we’ll give you some airtime. But we can’t play your tapes in our facilities. But if you want to go live, you can drive to the top of Mount Larson on a bunch of unpaved roads, and you can sit in the dirt, and you plug your little consumer cameras into one of the broadcast towers up there, and you can go live.”

And so that kind of birthed the beginning of ACTV. Channel 10 is now considered the longest-running access channel in the country.

Your film captures a bit of the vibe of Channel 10. Can you give us a sense of what that was? I mean, obviously you gotta see it to really believe it, but describe it for me.

Well, the thing about our movie was, we knew from the start that this was such a big topic that we didn’t want to do like a soup-to-nuts Ken Burns-style film, because it would literally be like a Ken Burns “Civil War.” It would be like a box set you have to get.

And so what we kind of said was, well, why don’t we kind start in media res around the 1980s when it’s been around for about a decade and we’re just gonna kind of throw you into that world after it’s been kind of established a little bit where it has this insane public access television where anyone – I mean, wealthy, unhoused, doesn’t matter – could walk in, pay a small fee, take a couple of classes, and here you go. We’re giving you state-of-the-art equipment, even though it’s well-used, and you can go out and make a show about basically anything you want. 

And also, when you get into the later ’80s, our facilities are open 24 hours. So you can drop in at 2 a.m. and either do a show or dance around while somebody has a band. And it’s just this thing that keeps going. It’s almost like this magical camera being passed from person to person to person to a person. Doesn’t matter what part of town you’re in.

So it didn’t stay in the patch of dirt forever. Obviously there were facilities, there were cameras, things got a little bit more… I want to put quotes around “professional” because it sounds like “amateur” is exactly what it was always still about, right? It was really whoever wanted to be a part of this. 

The thing that was so amazing about this, and this is all kind of subtext for the film, because again we kind of throw you into the middle of like this town that is just alive with making television, that is wild and crazy and eclectic and alive…

Some of the backstory is that around the early 1980s, the contract for cable in Austin kind of came up so bidders could get it again. And so it was very competitive to control the cable in Austin. And so one of the things that became Austin CableVision – what they did was they saw that we already had this very healthy kind of public access program. And they said, “well, to sweeten the deal, we’re going to give you basically the best public access facilities in the country.”

So they let them use the CableVision facilities, use this equipment that was just leaps and bounds above what a lot of people in the country had. And because of that, even though yes, it was still amateur, some of the stuff that some of these people were doing would rival network television, if you were to see it. It was amazing, the facilities that they had for the time.

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Well, let’s talk about some of these characters. Obviously, you couldn’t feature every producer, every type of show on ACTV. You chose some very particular shows. Could you tell us about Livia Live?

Oh my goodness, the second you say “Livia Live,” I promise you there are countless Austinites who just their ears perked up when they heard about that.

So Livia, again, to bring it back to UT, was getting her Ph.D. in geophysics. Of course, no small task, right? And she, in basically one night she was watching TV with her friend. She was a night owl like all these Ph.D. students are. And came across a call-in show with the great Dean Langston, who was kind of the king of call-in shows. 

And basically the thing is that a lot of people would do after-hours at ACTV would be sometimes not even really having a plan. They would just go in and put a phone number up and people would just start calling in. And when I say people, I mean like half the town.

My good friend Keith Kretzilis, who had a show called “Conk,” his quote was, you know, “I couldn’t hang up fast enough” it’s kind of what it was. It was just constantly lighting up. And over the course of this, of like watching the show, just fell in love with this concept. So I could go on TV and just give advice or have people call in and people are actually gonna wait and some people won’t even get online. 

And so the show was called “Singles Hotline,” where you call in and it’s kind of like an OKCupid for today. You call in, and they would write down, you know, your vital statistics, what do you do, what do you look like, what part of town are you coming from.

And so she decided to call in and she was so entertaining that Dean, the host of the show, invited her to be a live guest. And from that, she just fell in love with it. 

And her show ended up being “Ask Livia LIVE!,” which was a show that was all about dating and oftentimes sex advice, people talking about more romantic things. And because it was on late night access, they could swear, they could talk about a lot of issues that even Dr. Ruth couldn’t talk about. 

And she would dress the studio to be kind of like a boudoir, and she’d wear kind of an Elvira-esque type outfit. It’s amazing because she would toe the line between like dealing with guys that were calling in as prank callers, but then women that would call in and say, “I just found out I was pregnant.” Or “I’m being harassed by my boss at work.”

And so there was this really interesting dichotomy between being funny and giving out very critical advice.

One of the channel’s most recognizable characters was Carmen Banana. Can you describe her and give us a sense of her presence? 

Oh, Carmen Banana. Carmen Banana, I’m since very good friends with the person who played the character of Carmen Banana.

But basically what that is is Carmen Banana was a Banana – and I say “was” but I could just as easily say “is” because I still believe that Carmen could have a show. She was a Carmen Miranda-esque drag queen – and if you remember, Carmen Miranda is famous for having like the fruit hat. But this one had a fruit hat, but it had a giant paper mache banana sticking out. 

And it started out as just a cooking show because they thought it’d be funny to cook banana dishes. But then the question came up of, well, how many things can you really cook out of bananas? So after a while, it became a variety show. They posted a thing saying, “if you have a talent, you can come on and do it.” And everyone from knife-throwers to fire-spinners to, you know, her being sawed in half, to bands, start coming on.

And it became this beloved variety show. Children loved this drag queen and would come on and like, she had a character called Fonda Banana that would do exercises and the kids would come on and exercise with her. 

But the thing is what really became serious, just like Livia, was when the AIDS crisis really hit. And there was a very big lack of information about how AIDS was spread. People thought that you could get it from water fountains, from being in contact with somebody.

Given the subject matter, it sounds very weird to say this, but in a very eccentric, fun way, addressed safe sex and put a condom on a banana and would have these safe-sex players come on and really provided life-saving advice to a community in Austin that specifically was hit hard, that was just gradually dying out. 

So it’s interesting, you’re bringing up these characters, each one of them has a “why I got into it” and “oh, it’s fun.” And then it kind of morphs into something very crucial to what the mainstream media wasn’t giving the city. 

Well, there’s something else that comes up. The city’s reaction to a march by members of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s. How were public access producers caught up in that march and what happened afterwards?

I’m so glad that you asked that. So the whole thing is, there have been – and this is something I don’t want to be a scholar in – but when you’re making this documentary, you have to learn about the subject matter.

There were various resurgences of the KKK throughout history. And obviously the big one was during Reconstruction, when they really first came about. And then there was another one really in the 1950s and ’60s, during the Freedom Riders and integration of schools. 

And oddly enough, in the early 1980s, the KKK really had a resurgence as a result of a kind of Reaganomics and this fear of communism. But the big difference between the ’80s and a lot of previous things is that the media took a real interest in them and was giving them a lot of airtime. You could turn on “Donahue” and see the KKK on there.

And even though they were painted as villains, they were still getting their message out, and people were still able to hear this message and, you know, one out of 100 might be like “I agree with them.” And so, you know, there’s a famous Geraldo Rivera where there’s KKK on there.

But the problem was a lot of media outlets were covering them because they made news, but they weren’t covering the anti-Klan efforts – about the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, about the Black Citizens’ Task Force, the Brown Berets. 

And all of these people that were really banding together to face off against the Klan, a lot of them were not getting news coverage. So a lot this fell on public access, especially if there was going to be… Like in 1983, the city council approved a permit for the KKK to march through Austin. They did it again in 1984. 

And it’s one of these things where a lot of people were like, “this is a terrorist organization. How can you do this?” But the coverage of the backlash was not getting as much press. So you had these groups that were going and really making their own programs, or documenting that, and also using it as kind of a recruitment tool against the Klan.

So kind of, of course, nobody wants to do that, but it really turned into public access being used as a vital communication tool for civil rights. In a time when you think we’d be over this, no. Early 1980s – big, big time for the Klan.

Well, there was so much I’m sure you left on the cutting room floor. You’ve been working on this film, I understand, for about 10 years. 

Exactly 10 years.

Well, congratulations on reaching the finish line. What motivated you to keep going and what were some of the challenges that you confronted along the way?

Well, one of the biggest challenges is, like you said, is the concept of there are gonna be people that are gonna watch this film, and I like to believe everyone’s gonna enjoy it because we tried to paint an atmosphere. But of course, in a 90-minute film, with this dense of a subject matter, there’s gonna be a lot of stuff that’s kind of on the cutting room floor. 

Like I said, we don’t cover soup-to-nuts the entire history of everything. I was talking to a wonderful member of the Texas Standard family, Shelly, before this, and we could have waxed poetic for hours about this, we absolutely could have. But one of the hardest things was deciding what we were gonna put in these specific 90 minutes. 

The thing that really kept me going, I’d say, is that the City of Austin, Cultural Arts Division, which was like a lifeline for us – oftentimes, they would provide city funding for a lot of projects that are city-related. But one of their rules is, if we give you city funding, you put on a free public event. And so that makes sense if you’re painting a mural, maybe the free public event is a mural unveiling. Maybe if they give you money that helps you put on a play, you have a night where you have a free night or a matinee or something. 

For us, A: the movie wasn’t done. And B: we wanted to premiere at a festival.

So we were kind of like, “well, wait a minute, what can we do?” Because we wanna do something big. And so what we decided to do was – let’s just take the clips that we think are the funniest and most enjoyable and let’s just do a clip show. Let’s just go to a theater and let us just celebrate. Let’s invite the people who made these and let’s all just laugh and have a good time.

And that’s exactly what happened. We sold out the Spider House Ballroom, got everyone there. The next year, AFS Cinema gave us their large theater, which we also sold out. 

And what kept me going, to answer your question, is just realizing – cause I’m preserving a lot of this myself – if I don’t put this out there, I think some of it’s never gonna be seen. And this stuff is the history of the city and just in general, they’re insanely emotional, beautiful moments. 

So knowing that I had really tapped into something that was much bigger than me, and also I think very much apropos to people not just in Austin, especially in today’s politics when we talk about white supremacy and Carmen being a drag queen and like all these things, just how relevant this is. Just kind of knowing that if I didn’t finish this project, a lot of that was gonna go by the wayside.

That’s kind of what kept me going for literally 10 years. The day we finished our Kickstarter was exactly to the day, 10 years from when we uploaded our DCP, which is gonna be projected to Fantastic Fest.

So you mentioned “Livia Live.” We talked about Carmen Banana, these icons of ACTV. You talked to them, you’re friends with them now. What was it like for them to revisit this time in their lives? How did they look back on it and view it now?

Well, here’s the thing. They’ve seen stuff over the years. I’m saving my special premiere for them, kind of. I have a special thing that I’m doing for each one of them. So they haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve informed them many times of what’s going into it. 

I actually built a YouTube and an Instagram for Carmen Banana as just a present. I took all their videos, digitized it, put it on YouTube, put it on Instagram. Carmen loves that. 

Gilberto – he got a mural dedicated to him, which I filmed for that. Livia is still a good friend of mine. I drove out to L.A. to see her a couple of years ago. 

So it’s one of those things where we literally just finished the movie like two weeks ago. And so I’m planning, I have kind of a special thing I’m going to do for them where I wanna kind of celebrate them like in a special way.

What happened to ACTV?

I’m very glad you asked that because whenever I talk about this, I feel like I’m always talking about it in the past tense. But the thing is though, I say “longest-running channel.” ACTV went through a lot of different incarnations over the years. In the 1990s, they changed the name from ACTV to ACAC, Austin Community Access Center, because they were starting to integrate the internet and stuff into it. Then eventually it became PAC. And then eventually it became Channel Austin, which it was until 2015. 

But what happened was, around 2015, there was kind of a scare that maybe Austin is going to lose its public access channel because the contract was up for review. And so in the biggest twist of irony ever, Richard Linklater – I don’t have to explain to you who that cat is – he’s one of my personal heroes. He helped co-found the Austin Film Society in 1985. He’s always been a huge champion of access, as have all of his cofounders. 

So the Austin Film Society took over the access contract and they made it Austin Public. Now the great thing about Austin Public today, it’s no longer 24 hours, but the thing is though, not only is it content creation, as they call it, not only does it still stream on U-verse and stuff like that, but it has a Roku app. A lot of people will stream simultaneously on Twitch or YouTube or Facebook. 

So they found a new thing, but also there’s a huge cinema component to it now, where you have people training people how to be first ADs, you have training people how to direct, they’re screenwriters. When you get a producer – I could be wrong on this, don’t hold me to it – but I believe when you get a producer’s license, it helps you get discounted tickets at AFS. 

So it’s become this synergy like I’ve never seen. And honestly, it is so healthy now. People love it. Podcasting is a big part of it. 

It really has morphed with the times, which is amazing because a lot of public access stations around the country didn’t do that. A lot of cities would cut funding for public access or cut the amount that cable companies were required to pay because they would say, well, what’s the point? We have smartphones. We have computers. Why would you do that?

But given our story tradition, we held onto it and we still have money from the AFS. So where other places were failed, they either didn’t morph to new communication models or lost funding, we kind of have flourished under that. And there really is a whole new generation of young producers who have discovered this. 

And what’s more important is people have realized that sometimes it’s not even about your vision of a show, it’s about having a space for three hours and inviting a bunch of friends down and saying, “let’s make something.” Sometimes the show is even the last part of it. Let’s just have people down here and we’re gonna film whatever the heck we do.

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